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Hi everyone I am new to this forum and would need some helps regarding how photorec works.

I had a hdd with a lot of bad sectors(1000+) which I cloned painstakingly using ddrescue in Parted Magic, without the splitting options as it ran way too slow. Now I foolishly ran a chkdsk /f on the cloned partition afterwards, which it then marked a lot of the space as free, possibly because most of the files and folders were corrupted and unreadable.

My question is, when chkdsk marks the space as free space and deleted the corrupted files and folders, can photorec still recover them? I don't know how strong chkdsk is, does it permanently delete them such that they are unrecoverable? If so I would need to clone the bad hdd again and make sure I run photorec first before doing chkdsk on it.